COMMENTS:Near Manitou Springs.
n 1895-6, Gillette had a professional minor league baseball team, playing in the Colorado State League. The other teams in the League were Denver, Pueblo, Colorado
Springs, Leadville and Aspen.
REMAINS:The
church and a few other remnants.

The only Bull Fight ever held within the continental United
States was held in Gillett in the year 1895. Real bulls and bullfighters
were imported from Mexico. So much was done to promote the event, nearly
50,000 persons attended. They came from far and wide. There were celebrities
from throughout the United States and Mexico, all expecting to see a rousing
bull fight. It was a fiasco. Some say the bulls were tired from the long
trip from Mexico. Whatever happened, the 50,000 persons were looking for
a fight, not excuses. The bullfight ended in a riot. The story ended on
a positive note, however. The bulls were slaughtered, dressed and passed
out to the poor. Gillett was a family town. Some good mines in the area
made the town a busy one. The city had some of the best residential dwellings
and many churches. Gillett started disintegrating during the early 1900s.
Now the ruins of an old church, located in the middle of a hay field west
of the highway, and the old jail, near a small cluster of houses at a turn
in the road, and an isolated hydrant of two are all that is left. Submitted
by Henry Chenoweth.

The reason that there is so little left there, is because on June 16,
1965, a terriffic storm devastated the Front Range of Colorado from
Pueblo to Denver, dumping up to 14 inches of rain in a few hours. Some
of the rain advanced to the nearby mountains, and a small earthen dam
above Gillette, formerly used for water by the townspeople, collapsed
and a wall of water rushed down the gorge and out onto the valley where
the ghost town stood. It wiped out most of what was left of the town,
leaving only a few stone structures and some houses that were out of
the
path of the water. My dad and I visited the ruins a month or so later
and the devastation made an impression on my mind, as a 10 year-old
boy, that I've never forgotten.